Bear, 2001

Tim Hawkinson has made a career of bringing the most inventive and varied range of materials to life in a wide-ranging body of work. He takes a simple proposition to great extremes. His process can be long and arduous, labor intensive and repetitive. Play and humor emerge. He has a predilection for using what’s ready at hand including his own body as material, reference and model. He has a persistent fascination with perception, time, scale and the “primitive” or rudimentary. His investigations produce the craft to take the ordinary into new and astonishing realms.

This is apparent in his proposal for the Stuart Collection: a bear (resembling a teddy bear), 23 feet 6 inches high, sitting in the spacious Academic Court yard of UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering . It is only after thinking about this idea for some time that one starts to understand the complexities, both practical and aesthetic. Bear is made out of 8 very large stones (torso, head, ears, arms, and legs), weighing 180 tons. It looks warm and cuddly, but is hard as rock! It looks simple to build but the engineering is very complex and was a challenging project for students in the Engineering School. It pushes the bounds of credibility and makes you think: Where did they find these rocks? How did they get them here? Are they real? How are they held together? On the one hand, the sculpture is massive, permanent, thoroughly engineered. At the same time, it has a form – a toy bear - that one knows to be soft and cozy: a form that one associates with childhood and play. The bear can be seen framed through the trees leading to the Academic Court, which is itself very large (about 150’x350’). As you get closer, you see the mass, the monumentality and the stone surfaces. It becomes immense, especially in the context of the scale of a toy. The rounded, ancient, weathered, natural granite contrast with the high tech, anodized and highly manufactured surfaces of the bioengineering and computer science buildings. The notion of a bear in this world is surprising and provocative.

Tim Hawkinson was born in 1960 in San Francisco, studied at San Jose State and UCLA, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He is rapidly gaining recognition in the international art world. His work has been exhibited at the Armory in Pasadena, the Venice Bienale (1999), the Hirshhorn Museum and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C., the Power Plant in Toronto, Ace Gallery ( New York and Los Angeles), Akira Ikeda Gallery in Japan, the Serpentine Gallery in London and recently at the Cartier Foundation in Paris. Hawkinson made one of the most remarkable works ever, Uberorgan, for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MOCA) in North Adams. As far as we know, it is the largest indoor contemporary sculpture yet created. A major and comprehensive mid-areer survey of the artist's work - co-organized by the Whitney Museum of America in New York and Los Angeles County Museum of Art - was seen in both locations in 2005. Hawkinson’s Bear is his first public outdoor work.

Press Releases

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UCSD News: Bear News Releases - How To Make A Big "Bear"

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